Partnership For Policy Integrity

How did something that emits so much conventional pollution, and more greenhouse gases than coal, come to be incentivized as “green” energy?

Gasification is not a magic technology that makes toxics disappear. New garbage gasifiers in Massachusetts will emit hundreds of tons of air pollution and consume materials that should be recycled.

Considering renewable energy is supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including low-efficiency, high-emissions biomass power in state RPS programs doesn’t make sense.

The State of Massachusetts is serious about reducing carbon emissions and policymakers realized that providing renewable energy subsidies to a technology that makes climate change worse didn’t make sense.

High-emissions biomass power doesn’t belong in a renewable energy portfolio alongside no-emissions technologies like wind and solar.

Biomass power plants won’t reduce residential wood-burning and the pollution it produces one iota, but will add hundreds of tons more new particulate matter and ozone-precursors to the air.

By pretending that cutting and burning whole trees doesn’t add carbon to the atmosphere, the newly watered-down Massachusetts regulations claim the legitimacy of being “based on Manomet” – while ignoring that study’s key finding.

EPA has been presented with ample evidence that biomass energy increases greenhouse gas emissions, but has ignored the science to favor a politically-connected industry.

What do Australia and Massachusetts have in common? Both governments are have cutting edge energy policies that acknowledge the drawbacks of biomass energy – showing that biomass energy is truly an emerging threat to forests worldwide, but that sane policy responses are possible.

The Massachusetts rules will require for first time anywhere in the world that renewable energy credits for biomass energy be granted based on a common sense, life cycle assessment of the carbon emissions of burning forest wood to generate electricity.

April 12 was a “hazardous” day for air quality in western Massachusetts, yet it’s full speed ahead for the Palmer Renewable Energy plant in Springfield, which will be one of the largest emitters of particle pollution in the region.

When the dust settles from the public hearing on the Palmer Renewable Energy biomass plant in Springfield, MA, Hampden country will still be out of compliance with pollution standards for ozone, Springfield’s kids will still have asthma and elevated blood lead levels at twice the state average, and the city will still be experiencing high particle pollution. And that’s if they don’t build the plant.

The Manomet study relies on a number of assumptions that minimize the calculation of net carbon emissions from biomass, meaning that actual emissions are likely significantly greater than the study concludes.

The only independent, multi-stakeholder study of the carbon impacts of burning trees to generate electricity found that it would take 40 years of forest regrowth just to get to parity in carbon pollution with burning coal for those same four decades. To get to parity with natural gas would take almost a century.